BEFORE: This may be the LAST of the films that played at the AMC in the summer of 2021, when I worked there - of course, I can't be sure. More keep popping up. But it's been two years, surely I must have now seen everything that I didn't see then because I was busy sweeping up the theaters and emptying garbage cans. Right?
Audra McDonald carries over from "Wit".
THE PLOT: Following the rise of Aretha Franklin's career from a child singing in her father's church choir to her international superstardom, "Respect" is the remarkable true story of the music icon's journey to find her voice.
AFTER: Yeah, so August 13 in 2021 was when this opened, and I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that it took two years for me to link to it - this just wasn't easy to get here. When I saw that Forest Whitaker could be used as a link to get really close to Father's Day, I felt like I had to take that opportunity - I've just back-burnered this one three times, maybe.
But now that I finally got here, I'm kind of underwhelmed. It turns out that if you're not really into Aretha, watching this film isn't really going to change your position. I was a big fan of "American Idol" back in the day, so naturally I'm happy to see Jennifer Hudson doing well, but then again, I don't think this film did the big business that someone was expecting it to. Yeah, I'm right, this film with a $55 million budget only grossed about $32 million, so that's a failure by some standards.
Honestly, I found a lot to be confusing here because the film didn't exactly spell everything out - but I can always catch up by reading the factual details of Ms. Franklin's life on Wikipedia after the film is over. She was born in 1942 in Memphis, her father was a Baptist minister and her mother was a pianist and vocalist. Her parents both had children from previous relationships as well as four children together. The family moved to Buffalo when Aretha was two and then to Detroit when she was five. (The film skips over montages of the family packing and moving, because that tends to make for a boring movie.). But her parents separated in 1948 and Aretha's mother moved back to Buffalo, then died a few years later in 1952, ruining Aretha's 10th birthday. Aretha focused on learning to play piano and also singing in her father's church.
Aretha went on tour with her father, and they spoke and sang in churches around the country - this put her in contact with civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and celebrities like Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke and gospel singer Clara Ward, who then had a relationship with Rev. Franklin. At the age of 18 Aretha decided to follow Sam Cooke into the music industry, and her father acted as her first manager, he turned down Berry Gordy to sign Aretha to Columbia. There were several albums released by Columbia under the production of John Hammond, but by the mid-1960's Aretha wanted to move out of the jazz and standards genre and into pop music. It seems her income at the time was coming more from nightclub appearances than record sales.
The film details Aretha's transition from Columbia to Atlantic Records, working with producer Jerry Wexler and recording at FAME Studios down in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. THIS is the kind of stuff I dig seeing in movies, watching a song come together via the various studios musicians just noodling around and suggesting different rhythms and beats. If they just made a movie full of scenes like the one here where Aretha and Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section assemble the song "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You", I would maybe be so much more into this. Bu I guess not everybody is as into the studio stuff as I am, because the film then skips ahead a bit, to Aretha in concert, performing songs like "Chain of Fools" and "Think". The song that they then show her screwing up (because she's drunk) is "I Say a Little Prayer", which of course we all know as a Dionne Warwick song, but I guess Aretha recorded it too?
The film gets into Aretha's first marriage with Ted White, which was marked by domestic abuse and also White getting into fights with the record producers and band members in Muscle Shoals, so at some point he was asked to remove himself from the recording process. Obviously they broke up at some point, but the film shows Aretha reconciling with Ted, which seems a bit counter-productive from a narrative standpoint. And then at some point later, she's with her second husband though the film neglects to name him (Glynn Turman) and so at that time, Aretha was the mother of four sons and also stepmother to three other children. But the film doesn't really get into that, or who the father of her first two sons was, so I think they really glossed over a lot here, kind of like how the documentary about Mohammad Ali didn't mention all of his wives or most of his many, many children.
Also, why mention Aretha's drinking problem and just gloss over the fact that she was often very overweight? That seems like a bit of an odd place to draw the line, we'll talk about THIS but we won't talk about THAT. What if the two problems were connected? I guess she quit smoking because it was affecting her voice, but then, perhaps like many people who quit smoking, she gained a lot of weight. She had some undisclosed surgery in 2011, but denied that it had anything to do with the weight loss that followed. But whatever medical problem it was, isn't it better for people in the public eye to discuss these things, because that helps raise public awareness of whatever condition that is. Just saying.
I'm going to count this as a sort of Father's Day film because so much of the first half was about Aretha's relationship with her father, the Baptist preacher. Also because it suits me to do so, and makes me look like maybe I planned things that way.
Also starring Jennifer Hudson (last seen in "Monster"), Forest Whitaker (last seen in "Freelancers"), Marlon Wayans (last seen in "Air"), Marc Maron (last heard in "The Bad Guys"), Albert Jones (last seen in "Marriage Story"), Leroy McClain, Tituss Burgess (last heard in "The Addams Family"), Saycon Sengbloh, Hailey Kilgore, Tate Donovan (last seen in "Rocketman"), Mary J. Blige (last seen in "Mudbound"), Kelvin Hair, Heather Headley, Lodric D. Collins, Gilbert Glenn Brown (last seen in "The Best of Enemies"), Brenda Nicole Moorer, Skye Dakota Turner, Kimberly Scott (last seen in "Flatliners" (1990)), Myk Watford (last seen in "The Kitchen"), Nevaeh Moore, Kennedy Chanel, Peyton Jackson (last seen in "The Harder They Fall"), Joe Knezevich (last seen in "Boss Level"), John Giorgio, Shaun Schneider, Zach Strum, Alec Barnes, Beau Scheier, David Simpson (last seen in "Green Book"), Joshua Mikel (last seen in "Term Life"), Henry Riggs, Drew Matthews (last seen in "Mother's Day"), Jason Michael Webb, Vance Taylor, Rachel Nicks, Christen Sharice, Eric Scott Ways, Christopher Windom, Brian Bascie, Jelani Alladin (last seen in "Tick, Tick...Boom!"), Aba Arthur, Tyner Rushing (last seen in "The Contractor"), Hannah Lowther, Lelund Thompson, Derrick James, M. Jearl Vinot, Tony F. Charles, James E. Hammond, Thelma R. Mitchell, Leandra Ryan, Perry Zulu Jr.
with archive footage of Aretha Franklin (last seen in "What's My Name: Muhammad Ali"), Dan Aykroyd (last seen in "Air"), John Belushi (last seen in "Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer"), George W. Bush (ditto), Bill Clinton (ditto), Hillary Clinton (ditto), Carole King, Martin Luther King (last seen in "What Happened, Miss Simone?"), Barack Obama (also last seen in "Air"), Michelle Obama (last seen in "Buddy Guy: The Blues Chase the Blues Away"), Luciano Pavarotti (last seen in "Sheryl").
RATING: 5 out of 10 platinum albums on the wall at Columbia
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